Chapter 31 The Drive Home

Chapter 31 The Drive Home

Daisy

Oakwood won twenty-eight to fourteen.

The stadium knew it before the final whistle: that specific shift in crowd energy that happened when a game stopped being a question and became a celebration, the noise building from anticipation into something looser and more complete.

The marching band launched into the fight song, and the bleachers became a wall of blue and gold movement, and Chloe grabbed my arm with both hands and jumped twice.

"That's twenty-three wins in a row!" she announced to me specifically, like I was the official record keeper.

"I know," I said, because Chloe had told me this statistic approximately four times in the past hour.

"That's a school record." She was already gathering her scarf and her bag with the efficient energy of someone who intended to be the first person to the exit. "Can we go down to the field? I want to see Liam after."

Beside me, Sarah was already standing, scanning the celebrating crowd with the bright attention of someone who had enjoyed herself despite claiming neutrality about sports. Maya had closed her book three minutes before the final whistle, which for Maya was the equivalent of a standing ovation.

"Five minutes," I told Chloe. "Then we need to start heading out."

We made it down to the lower concourse level in the general flow of the crowd, and I was mentally reorganizing my evening study session to move to ten, integrating problems, and sleeping by midnight if I was efficient—when Chloe stopped walking.

"Oh," she said. "I forgot."

I looked at her. "Forgot what?"

She turned with the expression of someone delivering news they were not entirely sure would land well.

"Pedro can't come pick me up tonight. He's driving Mum to the Harrington exhibit." She looked up at me with enormous eyes. "I was going to text Liam but then the game started and I forgot."

Maya made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

"So how were you planning to get home?" I said.

"I thought maybe you could—"

"Chloe."

"Or Liam could—"

"Chloe."

"Or we could wait for Liam together and then—"

"I have work to finish at the school library," I said. "I was going to stay an hour after and then take the bus."

Chloe's face did something complicated. She was twelve, which meant she was too old for the full lower-lip deployment but still young enough that the intent of it showed clearly in her expression.

She pulled her scarf tighter and looked at me with the quiet certainty of someone who had already calculated that this was going to resolve in her favor.

"I don't want to wait by myself," she said, dramatically.

I looked at Maya.

Maya looked at her book.

"I could take you both," Sarah offered, then remembered. "Oh—no, I can't. I'm meeting my parents for dinner at eight."

I looked at the ceiling of the concourse, which was a painted concrete overhang with a water stain in the shape of something vaguely geographic. I looked at it for three seconds.

"Fine," I said. "We'll wait for Liam."

Chloe's face rearranged itself immediately into something much more satisfied. "Thank you, Daisy."

"Don't thank me yet. He might be a while."

"He's always a while after games," she said cheerfully, already heading toward the family waiting area near the south tunnel exit.

"But I know where the good vending machine is."

Maya and Sarah left after five minutes—Sarah with a hug and a meaningful look I chose not to interpret and Maya with a quiet "text me" that covered several things at once.

Chloe and I found the vending machine, which was in a corridor off the main concourse and did indeed have a superior selection. She got a bag of pretzels.

I got a water bottle and stood against the wall and opened the integration notes I had saved on my phone, because twenty minutes of waiting was twenty minutes of preparation.

Chloe sat on the bench across from the vending machine, working through her pretzels and fighting a losing battle with the post-game crash.

After ten minutes her head was drooping toward her scarf. By fifteen she was fully leaning against the wall with her eyes at half-mast.

"You can sleep," I said, without looking up from my phone.

"I'm not sleeping," she said. Her eyes were completely closed.

"Okay," I said.

Two minutes later she was asleep, her Oakwood scarf still wrapped twice around her neck, the pretzel bag balanced loosely in her lap.

I looked at her for a moment. Then I went back to my integration notes.

I heard them before I saw them.

Voices coming down the south tunnel corridor, the particular post-game register of people who had won something and were still running on it, loose and loud and easy.

A group of players still in partial gear, a few people I recognized from the peripheral edges of Liam's social world.

And then Liam, coming around the corner with his bag over one shoulder, his hair damp from a post-game shower, talking to someone beside him.

Tiffany.

She was still in her uniform, her hair perfect despite two hours of cheer formations, and she was walking close enough to him that their shoulders almost touched.

She was saying something, and he was listening with the particular set of his jaw that I recognized but couldn't currently categorize because I was not, I reminded myself firmly, cataloguing his expressions relative to Tiffany Thompson.

They came into the corridor, and Liam saw Chloe first, asleep on the bench with her scarf and her pretzels, and stopped walking entirely.

His expression shifted. The post-game ease gave way to something that was partly confusion and partly a softness he didn't fully control before he got it back under his management.

Then he saw me standing three feet away with my phone and my water bottle and my integration notes.

"What are you doing here?" he said.

"Pedro couldn't come," I said. "Art exhibit."

He closed his eyes briefly. "She didn't text me."

"She forgot. The game started."